Coromandel! (7 page)

Jason held Jane’s eye steady, the bull prancing between them. In her vacant, stunned submission to his stare, in the reaching out from his loins to her, the Oak and Horn overthrew them.

He turned away, Mary following him. He had to get out of Jane’s presence and control himself. As soon as the pipe and tabor stopped, the spell began to fade. He told himself the Oak and Horn was only a harvest dance, and Jane was a Pennel. In the black pit of his belly it made no difference. They were overthrown. Meantime--he didn’t want to talk to anybody.

‘Let’s go and listen to Speranza Voy,’ he said. ‘He’s always worth hearing. And you can watch him selling useless medicines to fools. But I shall have another mug of cider first.’

The crowd round Voy was as thick as ever. As they came close they heard him. ‘You’ll not regret it, master. Here, put it away; don’t show it to your friends, even. You don’t want anyone else to find the treasure, do you?’ Jason saw Voy hand a piece of folded paper to a gawky youth from Shrewford Admiral. At the same time Voy saw Jason, and his voice faltered, but he hurried on. ‘Hide--hide it till you can fit out your own ship. Of course you’ll find the gold where it’s marked on there. . . .’

Jason felt sick with a sickness of disgust, a hopeless, dead nausea. Voy was, after all, only the agent of those who feared him. At Voy’s hands they had set a bowl of cold, rotting tripes before him, and now watched to see him eat it.

The crowd drifted away. Jason said bitterly, ‘I thought you were my friend.’

Old Voy looked at him for a while, as if trying to find words. Jason thought: He is mean and weak. He pretends to himself that he’s a gentleman-adventurer, but he’s only a liar called Potts.

Old Voy’s eyes began to water, and he said, ‘Jason! You think I sold you a useless map? That boy only paid five shillings for his, and even that may be valuable. The seas are full of sunken Spanish galleons. I have to live. But that doesn’t mean your map is no good, does it?’

Jason was silent. It certainly did, really, but he could not afford to believe that there was no Coromandel. If there wasn’t, he would do better to go up at once to join the robbers on the Plain, before the people of this place walled him into prison.

Old Voy said earnestly, ‘As sure as I’m standing here, it’s a true map. You’re my friend. Do you think I’d take forty shillings off anybody for a worthless piece of paper?’

‘Forty shillings!’ Mary gasped. ‘Jason, you didn’t?’

‘Oh, be quiet, Mary!’ he shouted desperately.

Old Voy said, ‘You want to know where I got that map? Listen. ‘Twas in the desert, a league and a half outside Aleppo--nearer two. Come closer, I don’t want anyone but you to hear. In the desert outside Aleppo’--he took a quick draught from the jug of ale beside him--’I was riding on a camel, returning from a visit to the King of--ah--Balgallum, who lived out there; he’s not a big king, you understand, but he’s rich. I’d been making a secret treaty with him for the Levant Company. Then, in the distance, I saw a man staggering towards me across the sand. He was thin as a rake, lad, and starving, and his hair was white as swansdown, though he wasn’t old, and there were dried wounds and marks of the lash criss-cross on his chest. I slid down from my camel. .

Jason listened. His doubts and anger slowly, willingly, fell away. Robbers; thirst; the Grand Turk’s cavalry; men on small horses; mountains and snow and circling eagles; rivers, caves, and tigers--all for the sake of the map, his map.

Voy leaned back with a sigh, and Mary said, ‘I don’t believe a single word of it! Forty shillings! Jason, you’re madder than Softy Turpin!’

‘It’s all true,’ Jason shouted. ‘Voy’s my friend. You don’t know. You don’t understand.’ She was a country girl, and she’d lain in his arms on the dry leaves in the spinney with the moon at quarter, and she’d stood beside him atop the silent earth walls on Shrewford Down--but she didn’t understand. She could see that there must be a road to Coromandel.

She tried again to ask him about the map, but he hauled her so fast across the field that she didn’t have the breath. Near the oak tree Parson was clapping his hands and calling one and all to choose their partners and join in the dance of the Harvest Ring.

‘Well, here’s a chance to get your money back, and more,’ Mary said crossly. ‘There’s a big prize this year. Squire’s giving forty shillings, and a heifer in calf by his young bull. It’s that light heifer with the liver markings.’

Jason stared at the Pennels, hunching his shoulders and daring himself to do what he meant to do. Affection wasn’t enough. He was in love with Jane Pennel. He was a selfish, heartless man. He’d have to be quick. Mary expected to be asked to dance. His sister Molly was coming towards him, old Ahab Stiles trotting behind her like a ram with thoughts of tupping on his mind.

Jason said, ‘I’m going to ask Mistress Jane to be my partner.’

Molly had arrived. She cried, ‘Jason!’ But Jason knew that she understood, knew that the whole meaning of what he said had come to her in a flash as she heard him speak.

He left Mary’s frightened murmurings behind him and walked up to Jane Pennel. He touched his forehead and said, ‘Mistress Jane, will you dance the Ring with me? I think we’ll win.’

Sir Tristram frowned, and Hugo said coldly, ‘Certainly not.’

Jason said tensely, ‘I was asking Mistress Jane, Master Hugo.’

He held out his arm. Jane rose slowly to her feet and came to him. Together they walked into the Ring. Tom Devitt, Drake’s old sailor, noisily cleared his throat and cupped his hand to his mouth. He was drunk as a fiddler’s bitch by now, but Tom could call the Harvest Ring unconscious. He usually did.

Jason held both Jane’s hands and looked steadily at her until her head came up and her eyes met his. He pointed his left foot, and she pointed hers. The caller would call only once in each part of the dance, because it was a competition. After that the dancers had to remember the turns, but Jason knew no one was going to miss a step today. The prize would be won by the grace of their turns, by the poise of the movements and the pointing of the toe and the straightness of the leg.

Tom Devitt called, ‘The maidens in the middle and the men outside. To the left, to the right, dance the Old Wife’s Pride.’ Jason and Jane began to dance.

After ten minutes Jane whispered breathlessly to him as they turned back to back in the sixth change, ‘There are only two other couples left.’

He muttered, ‘Don’t look at them.’ She must not even think of the other dancers, or hear the singing of the drunkards outside the Cross Keys, or notice the amazed surprise in Parson’s smug face, or her father’s strange look, or Master Hugo’s black disapproval.

But he himself could not help seeing the Parson call one of the other couples out of the ring, and noticing their disappointed, sweating faces on the side. Now they’d be saying to each other, to console themselves, that he was still in there because his partner was Jane Pennel. Let them say. He and she were the best dancers in the Ring.

The other couple was good too. But he must not think of them, only of the shape of the dance, and the moves as fluent as the Avon flowing. Tom Devitt began to call the changes faster, until they were having only a single round of each. ‘Benjamin the Fiddler, call him down; Back-a-back and ride to town. . . . Green grass grows in the field, and turn. . . . Alton Chimes . . . Meadowsweet, meadowsweet. . .’

‘Oh, Jane,’ he whispered. Her eyes shone like large green stars. ‘Oh, Jane!’ he reached out his hands, and she caught them and held fiercely. They couldn’t put a foot wrong or miss the grip of their fingers for ever and ever.

‘Come to the spinney tomorrow afternoon.’

She muttered, ‘Yes.’

Something caught at his sleeve, and he brushed it off, not thinking, not taking more notice of it than of a fly.

Again it caught him, but harder, this time nearly pulling him off his balance. Angrily he glanced round, and Parson was shouting, ‘Go away!’ It was Softy Turpin, frowning ferociously beside him and ludicrously swinging round after him so that all the people rocked and screamed and slapped their thighs with laughter. Softy bawled, ‘She’m not started yet, your grace. She’m not started. No need for you to hurry!’

Jason stopped. It was no use. All the power of movement flowed out of his legs, and he could only stand there, trembling. He saw his father, hunched and dark beside the church wall, with three of his cronies. He saw Jane’s huge, soft eyes.

He muttered, ‘The red cow’s calving.’

He left her standing in the middle of the Ring and ran off. Mary was running after him across the field, and Molly was trying to stop her, but as soon as he got into the lane he left them both far behind.

Ten days later there was no moon, and it was a thick night, compounded of darkness and autumnal rain that flowed in a soft black stream over the Pewsey Vale. The wind had changed with the new moon, and blew this night quietly against his cheek as he hurried across the shoulder of the Plain on his way to Pennel Manor.

He came to the spinney and went carefully through it. He stroked his hand against the body of an ash as he passed it. The Oak and Horn had brought Jane here on that Sunday in the hazy afternoon, to lie down together with him here, so that afterwards they could look speechless into each other’s faces. Twice more they’d found an hour to come here. He had asked her to bring a book and teach him to read. She had, and had shown him the letters of the alphabet. Then she had read aloud to him from the book, but haltingly, for the words were long and strange. It was a book about a man’s travels in foreign countries, and as he lay listening he thought: When we marry we’ll have to go away to escape Sir Tristram’s anger. He saw her standing on the deck of the ship, her lips parted and her pale red hair streaming out behind her in the wind. They would search over the rim of the world for all marvels, for whales, cachalots, and dolphins, for flying fish and the magic lights turning in the waves under the ship.

But she stopped reading soon, and, when he began to talk longingly of those voyages as if they were reality, she shook her head impatiently and wanted to be told about ferrets and fitchews and how to set a snare, and she told him that he smelled of the farm, and reminded him that she could marry anyone she chose, even the King’s son, because she was Jane Pennel--but before the reading, when they first saw each other under the trees, she hadn’t thought of how he smelled or what he wore, but only ran breathlessly into his arms. The making love ended her love, but began his.

He came to the edge of the pasture, where he had killed the fox. The manor hedge was fifty yards ahead in the darkness, and the rain dripped off the homespun hood he wore on his head. The hounds knew him, because each time she came to the spinney she had pretended to be walking two of them, and--they’d cocked their big heads and whimpered while he kissed her.

He crossed the field, slipped through the hedge, and worked past the outhouses until he stood under the wall of the manor. He’d been here once or twice, but at the side door, waiting with a basket of eggs or a ham that the Pennels had bought from his father. The house was built all of new small bricks, and the windows had many leaded glass panes. It looked new, raw, and ungainly, but he thought it must be comfortable inside. Once, when Jenny the serving maid opened the door to him, he had seen only the big kitchen. Another time the door beyond the kitchen had been open, and through there it was different from anything he had ever seen. There was oak panelling in big carved squares from floor to ceiling, and tapestries hanging, and a whiff of beeswax polish coming out over the smell of cooking in the kitchen, and he had seen a table with carved legs, and two big globes standing on it, and through there the floor was made of little oblong wooden blocks. Then Jenny gave him a saucy remark and he had to slap her round buttocks, and someone shut the inner door.

He found the small window open, as Jane had promised, and climbed through it. Now he had to remember what she had told him. The staircase was on his right, and directly opposite him the great hall and fireplace. On his left there was a passage with two rooms leading off it. That passage ended in the door he’d seen from the kitchen. One of the two rooms was a store chamber, and the other a room full of books.

He was a little early. Perhaps Jane wouldn’t be expecting him yet. Perhaps her tirewoman was still hanging round before going through the upstairs door which divided the Pennels’ rooms from the servants’.

Thousands of books, she’d said.

He turned left and carefully opened the second door. A faint beam of light fanned out in the widening gap as he opened it, and in fright he held his hand steady. Hugo might be in there--but Hugo didn’t do much reading, and Sir Tristram was visiting Lord Henry in Admiral. He peered cautiously round the door. The room was empty. The light was coming in through the windows from the carriage lantern that hung over the front door of the manor. He slipped into the room and closed the door behind him.

There were the books. His heart bumped loudly. There was a smell of paper and leather, and the rows of leather backs swept up to the ceiling and round the four walls. He saw another globe on a table, and parchment, sand, ink, and quills beside it. But--the books! He took one out at random and carried it like a jewel to the window.

He opened it and stared at the print. It wasn’t even English. He knew the alphabet now, and this was different. He put it back and got out another. All writing, and he could not read.

He found a book with pictures on nearly every page. He burst out laughing with delight, and quickly hushed and listened, but no one moved in the big house. He was looking at a wondrous animal with a tail at each end and four, five, six men, carrying spears, in a box on its back. The animal had--he looked more closely--God’s blood, it had great teeth like a boar’s, only ten times bigger and curving down instead of up. He looked at the ceiling. That animal could not fit into this room. There was writing in the book as well as pictures, and he could not read it. Still, the pictures were more marvellous than shooting stars. He turned the pages greedily.